


it's (drippin) love

by EverybodyKnowsIt



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: A comprehensible timeline? A stable narrative? Who is she, Donghyuck is Pining and Pretty and In Love and you know what that's Valid, M/M, Non AU, Sun and Star metaphors, brief mention of reincarnation for flavor, markhyuck are Assholes and Soulmates and i heart them, poetics, sappocative, there was an attempt, this is sappy and i make no apologies, yet evocative????
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-12
Updated: 2019-05-12
Packaged: 2020-03-01 11:34:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,552
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18799531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EverybodyKnowsIt/pseuds/EverybodyKnowsIt
Summary: To look at someone is to hold power, to be looked at is that of a different kind. Looking is a kind of violence, and it burns where it touches.In other words: It takes a couple years for Donghyuck and Mark to fall in love, but when they do, they're gonna take the whole world down with them, baby.





	it's (drippin) love

Donghyuck was fifteen when he looked at Mark and took note of the way his heart started beating faster, thumping down to shaky fingertips and bubbling up to nervous laughter that soda-pop fizzles in his throat. He was fifteen and unstoppable, unreckonable in his fervor to conquer heaven and become one of its stars, but he was also fifteen and burdened with the urge to reach out and touch and never let go. Donghyuck did touch him, and Mark flushed crimson and pushed him away, a vast repertoire of insults dripping off his tongue, and Donghyuck wants nothing more than the feeling of it against his skin. Instead, he picks up a bedazzled microphone in the Mickey Mouse Club and sings until the music pushes up against his lungs so heavy he can barely breathe. He does his best to look to the adoring crowd of pretty young things who chant his name, who cheer for their full-sun to burn for them. He tries to look to them rather than where the shadow of Mark’s smile blooms quiet and lingering as winter sunrise.

In the end it didn’t work.

In the end, Donghyuck kept looking at Mark even when he had bottle-blond hair that frizzed like ramyun, and he kept looking when the stylists shaved-off half his eyebrows, and he even kept looking when they refused to speak one chilly summer of cold-war silence.

Donghyuck keeps looking because he likes the way Mark laughs with his head thrown back careless and eyes screwed shut, because his hands always find Donghyuck in any crowded room and rest heavy on the nape of his neck, because the way Mark raps lacquers his insides with sticky heat that settles low in his belly, because Mark remembers his birthday and his favorite songs and how he likes his coffee with two sugars except for during their late nights when he likes only one, because Mark is a musical genius and his lyrics tie Donghyuck’s heart into double-knots and loopty-loops, because Mark is beautiful and terrible in his devotion, because he can’t remember a time when he _wasn’t_ looking. In the end, Donghyuck looked at Mark till it consumed him whole, and then he kept looking.

 _That’s the problem with loving someone,_ Donghyuck bemoans, _you can’t stop even when you should._

* * *

Doyoung catches him looking at Mark one shimmering late night stage in Osaka--looking at him tender in a way that Donghyuck isn’t--and he grabs Donghyuck by the scruff of the neck backstage. “There’s something weak in him,” Doyoung had said then. “Something that never learned how to be gentle, something that is scared to love. You can’t see it, you’ve got stars burning in your eyes and can’t see it. But I do, clear as anything.”

Doyoung’s tenor can cut and draw blood as easily as crooning a melody, and his honesty spares no one, not even Donghyuck, not even a lovely, lonely full-sun infatuated with an Icarus who flies too close. Doyoung smiles sadly, but there’s no pity in it, not even a little, “Darling, don’t be silly. Boys like him weren’t raised to love softly, you know. He’ll take and take and take, until there’s nothing left.”

Doyoung’s words crack Donghyuck’s heart open like a pomegranate, he feels the ruby seeds fall out of him with each breath and wonders who made love into such gentle destruction.

(It’s a lie, he knows. He did, he made it this way. He was christened the sun and a sun can do nothing but burn. But oh, how it feels nice, my love, to be warm for once.)

((What Doyoung doesn’t know is that Donghyuck wasn’t raised to love softly either, that tiny songbird with Jeju volcanic ash thrumming through his veins and wildfire licking at the tips of his laughter. There is nothing for Donghyuck to fear, because he and Mark are one and the same.))

(((They are the same as Donghyuck never learned to be gentle either, and he and Mark share the gunmetal in their bones and the glass in their hearts, share the way they love brutal and true like only wild things can. Most of all, they share the way they look at each other, a gaze that takes and takes and _takes._ )))

* * *

When Donghyuck was seventeen he used to think that Mark deserved better, better than what he could ever hope to give.

He looks at the long-limbed, porcelain creature lying on the shag rug of their room, cloaked in summer sunshine and absorbed in his pages upon pages of verses and love-worn rhymes, and Donghyuck thinks that Mark deserves better. He thinks Mark deserves someone soft, someone with long spun-sugar hair and gentle thighs. Not a boy who burns and laughs at the ruins, a full-sun in his destruction and sinner’s gluttony. Not a boy like Donghyuck.

But then Mark starts to look back.

Mark starts to look back and Donghyuck sees what lies in the trenches of his gaze, burnt-umber brown and depthless under the fractals of _blue, hazel, violet_ color contacts. Mark starts to look back, backstage and during Vlive and in the reflection of the bathroom mirror while they brush their teeth at four in the morning, and it’s not quite full-blooded desire, but it’s a spark in his eyes where there wasn’t before. It’s somewhere to start.

It’s in the way Mark brings a hand down heavy on his thigh so Donghyuck feels the sting through his jeans hours later. It’s in the way he brings him back trinkets and pretty things, delicate silver chains and Balenciaga, from foreign lands across oceans and continents: He makes it seem like he was really thinking of Donghyuck half a world apart, like he sees pretty things and thinks of _his Haechan_ 30,000 km away and trapped in the gilded birdcage of Seoul’s songbirds. It’s in the way he calls him _Hyuckie_ in the dark, sometimes, when he thinks Donghyuck can’t hear him.

Most of all it’s in the way Mark _looks_ at him, and Donghyuck starts to see the way he burns reflected right back at him through Mark’s eyes.

It’s not love, not yet, but it’s raw in a way that Mark has never allowed himself to be before, and his stare burns Donghyuck like a brand, daring him to look away. It’s pointless, that dare of his. Donghyuck has been looking at Mark for far too long to be able to start rending the desire from his body, and the day he looks away they will bury him. Donghyuck smiles with starry teeth in the way the world fell in love with him for, and stares back.

_Try and brand me, baby, I burn back._

When Donghyuck was seventeen he thought Mark deserved better. But like is drawn to like, and idols with chameleon skins and eyes of liquid silk and voices of thunderstorm fury, boys with glass skeletons and gilded mouths and melting joints, wolf-boys like them who only know how to croon love songs and tear the world into pieces, only deserve each other.

* * *

”Am I pretty?” Donghyuck asks him one day, two hours passed in the stylists chair, eyes painted bronze like a knife and lips pouting cherry. He knows he is, his mirror and his fans and his mom wouldn’t lie, but he wants to hear the confession drip from Mark’s mouth, see the flush ride high on his cheeks.

Mark pauses, let’s his gaze drift from Donghyuck’s eyes to his glittering cheekbones till it rests heavy on his mouth. He avoids looking at the sharp dip of his shirt where it leaves the skin bare, the curve of his thighs where the leather is painted on. He swallows, meets Donghyuck’s gaze serious, “You’re inimitable.”

* * *

Sometimes, late at night when the others sleep--or when they’re out, always out, practicing themselves into the ground--Donghyuck stares at the ceiling and imagines that he sees constellations through the drywall. There’s a scratch in the ceiling that looks a little like Cassiopeia in the dark, if you squint, and he thinks that might be good enough to settle him for now.

Sometimes, when they stay too late at practice and dawn starts blinking through the windows, he deliriously imagines that he sees the stars in Mark Lee. He sees Ursa Major in the divots of his spine and Andromeda in the dip of his collarbones and Columba in the gentle flutter of his hands as they reach for him, and he wants to take these constellations, tuck them away in his pocket where he can hoard them to himself. He wants more than anything to feel the stars of his smile against his mouth. Instead Donghyuck laughs, laughs at his jokes and laughs at himself and dances just out of reach of Mark’s lingering touches, like the suns and stars and many moons impressed in Mark’s skin might burn him, just explode into a supernova and decimate him at the touch.

 _What a way to go,_ he thinks, before he falls asleep on Taeil’s shoulder next to the watercooler, _what a way to fall and what a lovely way to burn_.

* * *

In another universe Lee Donghyuck and Lee Minhyung finally learn how to love tender, how to love someone else. It’s not all-consuming and white-hot blinding like stardust, not like the way they had each other, but it’s enough to get by.

Donghyuck grows up heartbreakingly lovely and idol thin, with cold hands and a devastating voice that shatters the nation into glittering pieces, and he learns to love a man he must speak softly to, a man who stares at him with nothing but roses in his eyes. Mark learns happiness, or at least a kind of stillness that borders on it, though it doesn’t taste as sweet as he imagined it to. Mark Lee gets filthy rich off rap dripping dirty from his tongue and frustration cutting the edges of his dancing sharp, and he finds it within himself to love a woman who wears pearls around her neck and who touches him too gently, how an early spring touches February.

In this universe they drift apart. The rubber band that defines the tides of their _push_ and _pull_ doesn’t snap, it never will, not in any universe nor any galaxy, but it slackens enough to where it doesn’t matter. Donghyuck stops looking. Mark never bothered to look back. They meet once more in their thirties on a variety show and wonder what they missed, all those years ago, and then they never meet again.

_Did you ever love me, Haechan? Mark asks._

_You used to call me Hyuckie, Donghyuck responds tiredly, and that’s the only answer he needs._

In this universe there is a version of their love that ends unbloodied but sullen, where Donghyuck sells out Wembley Stadium and makes loneliness his closest lover, where Mark wins seven grammys and makes too much money but never sates the hunger that swallows him.

But this is not that universe, love, and things do not have to end bittersweet this life around. Donghyuck finds a boy with the world on his shoulders but heaven under his feet. Mark replaces his psalms with the curve of Donghyuck’s name in his mouth and finds it more honeyed than anything biblical, but just as holy. In this life, they burn each other to the ground, are reborn in livid splendor and ivory smiles. In this life they find each other, and it’s not gentle, but sometimes hellfire can devour sweetly.

If Donghyuck was a romantic he would call it destiny. Mark, Donghyuck has learned, is secretly a sentimental piece of shit, and he calls it fate.

The Gods allow for fairytales, sometimes. And whether it's destiny or fate or nothing but a  _look_ they share, even sinners deserve a soft end, sometimes.

And Donghyuck must be a sinner, he must, according to Mark’s bible, because how else could he ever know how to _want_ someone like this?

(Answer: Because looking is a soft kind of violence. Want is both its roots and its blossoms. Donghyuck is only a sinner in that he doesn't know when to just look away.)

* * *

Donghyuck was nineteen when Mark loved him back.

He feels more than hears Mark come up behind him, and the hands that rake across Donghyuck’s ribs mark him like a bite. His gold-spun hair is growing-in soot black at the roots and the teeth that graze along the shell of Donghyuck’s ear feel like a prayer, make him tremble. He thinks of Mark the marble-faced idol and Mark the screaming inferno and Mark the boy who grew up before his time, who grew up in front of him, next to him, _with_ him, and Donghyuck wants them all.

“We have to leave for schedules in twenty,” Donghyuck breathes, and he is known for many things but _control_ is not one of them, the tenable grasp he has on an air of boredom is slipping, betrayed by his staccato heartbeat underneath Mark’s palms.

Mark laughs quietly in Donghyuck’s ear, but in truth it's too fevered and too vicious to call it a laugh, “ _Fuck_ schedules,” And his hands wander lower. Lower and lower and lower and they burn where they touch him. They call Donghyuck the full-sun but there is more in Mark, he thinks. There are exploding galaxies condensed in this boy, there have to be, it’s the only explanation for why it feels like this, for how Mark shatters him like this.

But Donghyuck gives as good as he gets, and the gasping sound that leaves Mark’s mouth when he reaches behind and tugs sharply on his hair belongs in a church, it’s the only thing Donghyuck would ever kneel for at the altar.

Mark’s hands tighten where they rest on his sides, and it’s near bruising but just the way he likes it, makes the heat that lives inside him drip down and pool in the cradle of his hips. Mark leans in, “Come on Hyuckie, sing for me, please,” and it’s a low croon that curls in Donghyuck’s chest and makes him want to fall onto his back. “You’re so beautiful, so pretty it hurts me, I can’t help it when you look at me like you want to love me and burn me.” Mark’s wandering hands coax him closer, till there’s not a hair’s breadth between them, and Donghyuck shivers, flexing his hips till the friction hits him good and heavy. “Won’t you sing for me?” Mark begs, and he’s red and breathless, like Donghyuck is lighting him like a match without trying.

Donghyuck feels like he’s dissolving, and he turns around slinky in the tight cage of Mark’s arms till they're face to face. He looks at Mark, like he always has, like he always will, brings a hand up to drag across his jaw, “I’ll always sing for you,” he murmurs, and his voice is wispy and small like the breath was punched out of him. There can’t be such a thing as heaven, he thinks, not when living on earth looks like this.

Donghyuck sings for him, at once a prayer and a damnation, but this time he doesn’t pretend to look to anywhere but Mark.

**Author's Note:**

> I do NOT know what this is, all I know is that I had to write it. The NCT American tour has got me In My Feelings :" )
> 
> Let me know what you think!


End file.
